I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Effective advertising has a clear and simple visual language, and this is what UIs should strive for.

    Interfaces can be needlessly complex regardless of being flat or skeuomorphic.

    But flat interfaces still require mental effort to parse. Especially when the interface is complex and/or crowded and you’re trying to pick out active UI elements amongst decorations like group boxes/panels.

    Essentially, flat interfaces are currently popular because of touchscreen devices. Touchscreen devices have limited space and thus need simplistic UI elements that can be prodded by a fat finger on a small screen.

    But I don’t need a flat touchscreen-friendly interface on my non-touch dual 24" monitors with acres of screen real estate. I need an interface that nicely separates usable UI elements from the rest of the application window. That means 3D hints on a 2D screen, which allows my monkey-brain with five million years of evolved 3D vision the opportunity to run my “click the button” mental command as a background process.




  • Dave.@aussie.zonetoProgrammer Humor@lemmy.mlStop
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    3 months ago

    There was a series of books in the '80s where a systems programmer gets pulled through a portal into your typical magical world, good vs evil, etc.

    They subsequently look at the magical spells in use and realise they can apply Good Systems Programming Practices™ to them. And thus, with their knowledge of subroutines and parallel processing, they amplify their tiny innate magical abilities up to become a Pretty Good Magician™. So while all the rest of the magicians basically have to construct their spells to execute in a linear fashion, they’re making magical subroutines and utility functions and spawning recursive spells without halting checks and generally causing havoc.

    It’s quite a good allegory for modern times, where a select few build all the magic and the rest just have useful artefacts they use on a day to day basis with no idea how they work




  • What if I want to buy a cheese sandwich today with BTC?

    A cheese sandwich can remain the same fixed price in dollars for years, with only the relatively slow change in actual value due to inflation.

    I’ve seen BTC swing 10% in 24 hours. Does the cheese-sandwich-maker have to look up the rate this instant and calculate a spot price for me?

    Will they have more or less dollars at the end of the day, when they need to pay their bills and buy more cheese from their suppliers?

    “Just buy cheese from someone who takes BTC”, doesn’t help, it just kicks the can further down the road.

    “Just add a bit of a buffer in the price to take fluctuations into account”, means that I go buy a cheese sandwich with dollars from next door because it’s 50 cents cheaper for the same thing.

    As an investment vehicle, BTC is doing hot laps of the track, but until its volatility issues are sorted and it becomes “boring”, it’s not going anywhere as an actual currency.


  • that works how the article describes, where it will accelerate you to whatever the last cruise control speed was.

    That’s what the resume function does normally?

    That is:

    • You switch on and activate cruise control
    • You’ve tripped it while active by pressing the brake

    At this point cruise control is still “hot” and pressing resume will turn the cruise control back on, usually with a speed interlock so you can’t activate it at a dead stop.

    If the car has “one pedal driving” then inadvertent activation could be pretty surprising, and would require you to lift your foot off the accelerator and hit the brakes. Coupled with the rocket-ship acceleration of most EVs this could easily cause an accident I guess.


  • Webrings were themed though, so if your interest was cars, or cats, or ham radio, you could get on a webring for one of those topics and cycle through them.

    And it wasn’t all random, you could move left or right on the ring , or jump randomly. So a good webring manager could group sites together as you went around the ring as well.


  • Your rods and cones in your eye and the nerves that transmit the information to your brain have signalling limits, they can only fire so fast and they have a time to reset. It depends on lighting and what you’re focused on as well.

    Which is why film can get away with 24 frames per second because in a dark theatre and a bright screen 24 fps is enough to blur that signalling so that it looks like decent motion. Only thing cinematographers had to watch out for is large panning shots as our peripheral vision is tuned for more rapid response and we can see the juddering out of the corner of our eyes.

    I could see the 60Hz flicker of crt monitors back in the day if I had a larger monitor or was working next to someone with 60Hz. Not when I was directly looking at it, but when it was in my peripheral vision. The relatively tiny jump to 72Hz made things so much nicer for me.





  • You’re never going to live in a world where you’re allowed to fly without photo id amigo

    Move to a different country.

    Eg in Australia I can book a domestic ticket and have two interactions after that:

    • x-ray/security where they scan my carry on
    • boarding at the gate where they scan my pass.

    No photo ID - or any ID really - needed. Now there’s enough dribs and drabs of information when I book the ticket and etc etc that they can identify me, but there’s nothing stopping someone from booking a ticket for someone else under their name.



  • I end up having to play twenty questions with chatgpt. For example, I’ve been asking it for code examples for ffmpeg mpeg4 encoding with C++.

    It will happily spit out completely non-working code, where the core part - feeding image frames to the encoder - works, but it doesn’t initialise or tidy up the encoding afterwards.

    Until I say, “hey this code doesn’t seem to work and creates corrupted files”, and then it’s like, “oh yeah you also need to do a bunch of other stuff, just like this”. Repeat as it slowly adds more and more pieces until finally you end up with something that actually works.

    Or it will happily dream up function names or mix python and C functions, or will refer to older APIs even when I’ve specifically said “use API version x.y” and so on and so forth.

    If I didn’t know enough about the subject already, I’d never be able to tease out the answer. So in a sense it’s a mostly useful reference, but it can’t be relied on to actually and consistently provide a result because it’s all statistics and fuzzy text generation behind the scenes, not actual knowledge.


  • Seriously, give me any supported argument why it would be beneficial to send humans to the moon (and Mars) instead of just robots.

    Robots, in particular mining equipment robots that everyone seems to be jazzed up about, they need maintenance. Earth bound mining equipment has minor service intervals of 250 hours of operation, major intervals every thousand hours, machine-stopping breakdowns occur on a bathtub curve but there would be a dozen or so before the first 4000 hours of operation.

    For reference, 4000 hours of operation is less than half a year of 24/7 work.

    Even with the addition of a few hundred million per machine in hardening and robustness, the environment they will work in is much, much worse than earth. Seals will need frequent replacement, the parts that do the digging need replacement, hoses will burst or leak, etc etc.

    On the moon you could (probably) laboriously tele-operate repair robots with the 2.5 second lag you’d have to Earth.

    Mars? Not possible.

    So I look at all these plans, where they’ll send ice mining equipment to mars to run for two years unattended to make fuel and what-not, and with my 30 years of experience in the mining industry on earth, I just say, “that must be some good crack they’re smoking”.

    Someone is going to have to go, just to repair and maintain all the machines.


  • Big stainless steel hook , when anyone asks tell them it’s for your sex swing. The actual sex swing is optional but recommended.

    Otherwise look at fancy lights. You’ve got other lights in the room but maybe look for one that throws light horizontally, not downwards , at least it will still have some utility.

    Or a light with an elaborate shade, there’s those types with a pull string that give you endless patterns as they shift between two shapes.

    Throw a smart light bulb in there so you can muck around with colours and brightness.